Has Insomniac lost its spark?
Fuse began life as a different game by the name of Overstrike in 2011. It looked like a comedic third-person shooter by the minds of Ratchet and Clank, fast-forward to 2013 and it changed its name and identity. No longer is it funny, it’s more of your typical military third person shooter with a clichéd story about a energy source called Fuse which an evil organisation have stolen, it’s sadly completely forgettable and the characters aren’t as cartoony or funny as they were when the game was known as Overstrike.
In terms of a third-person shooter, Fuse doesn’t do anything that wrong. It works well…although it’s better with a friend or two as the AI is a joke. If you do play solo though, you can switch between characters at will and upgrade their abilities with XP earned via missions and kills. Unfortunately to upgrade characters abilities you need to be selected as them, so you may have to switch between them to upgrade the one you want…which seems rather clunky.
The campaign is brief too and forgettable. It’s nice that each character has their own specific weapon that helps with combat and teamwork, but the combat itself isn’t that great…it’s actually quite dull and repetitive with its settings, it’s a case of “been there, done that” but it’s been done much better by the likes of Gears of War. It even has a Horde-esque multiplayer mode which while enjoyable, is not nearly as good as it should be.
It doesn’t help that the visuals look quite dated either, there’s definitely an identity crisis with this game…it doesn’t know if it wants to be a serious shooter or one with comedy value and coming from Insomniac, it’s hard that they got it so wrong. The voice-acting isn’t funny; it can be painful at times due to bad lines and bad acting.
The Verdict
Fuse feels like an experiment to me, one that suffered from too many changes and the end result wasn’t worth it. If it stayed as a cartoony shooter with a Team Fortress 2/Ratchet and Clank look to it and a half-decent story, it would have been much more memorable. Instead it’s just a bog-standard third-person shooter and one that is forgettable in every way.
